Yimon Aye is a Beckman Young Investigator

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Syl Kacapyr

Yimon Aye, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, has received a Beckman Young Investigator award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. Aye is a Milstein Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow and is also an assistant professor of biochemistry in the Weill Cornell Medical College Department of Biochemistry.

The Beckman Young Investigator Program provides research support to “the most promising young faculty members in the early stages of academic careers in the chemical and life sciences,” according to the program guidelines. In particular, the award funds invention of “methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science.”

The Aye lab focuses on chemistry-driven methods in the field of chemical biology, with the goal of understanding redox-dependent cellular communications and response. Redox refers to chemical reactions in which atoms have their oxidation states changed. Timing of the signals and their specific targets are key switches for the fidelity of biological circuits and ultimately, human fitness.

The Beckman Foundation is supporting a technological breakthrough by Aye for the study of single redox events in living cells with precision timing. Using this tool, her lab aims to establish new mechanistic regulatory paradigms of redox-regulated proteins in cancers.

With dual training in small-molecule chemistry and mechanistic biology, Aye runs a highly interdisciplinary lab that allows her and her lab colleagues to develop novel chemical ideas to solve unaddressed problems in human biology.

Aye received her undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford, and her graduate and postdoctoral training in organic chemistry and mechanistic biology at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively.

The foundation will present Aye’s award during the annual Beckman Symposium, Aug. 7-9 in Irvine, California.